


Endurance

by lovesdaryl



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Adult Language, F/M, Mention of Child Abuse, mention of domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:16:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 9,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7346593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesdaryl/pseuds/lovesdaryl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Space-based AU. With over population being a serious issue, funding, manpower, and time is devoted to the exploration of space. Those brave enough to go out into the void just might have a chance of surviving longer than the doomed population of a polluted and dying Earth on a new planet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She looked at the gray concrete wall of her two-room apartment, the dim light from her ceiling lamp barely enough to allow her to see the lichen and mold growing in the corners of the ceiling. From time to time, her eyes fell onto the brochure again that she had just studied, printed on high-quality paper in bright colors unlike any seen anywhere else.

“Help Build Mankind’s Future in Space!” the header read. The front of the brochure showed a star-spangled sky, clearer and blacker than any she had ever seen, what with air and light pollution in the city. She couldn’t believe that the night sky had ever truly looked like this. It had to be fake. Standing out in brilliant white against this improbable black background was a colossal spaceship with a tapered nose, a bulky middle and, just visible on the brochure’s right edge, the ship’s drive, glowing blue-white, giving her the impression that the ship was going at full speed.

Looking up to check the ration meter on her tap, she saw that she was still good for two glasses of water. She got up from her wobbly synthplast chair and picked one of the used plastic bottles from the drain board. Holding it under the tap, she filled it until the gulping, hissing noises from the pipes along with her redlining ration meter told her that she had used up all her water for today. She screwed the lid on the bottle and set it aside. With the cobbled together air condition of the building offline again for the past three days, the air in the windowless apartment was hot and stale, and her eight year old daughter, Sophia, was guaranteed to wake up during the night and ask her for a glass of water before the rations for the next day had been pumped into the allocation pipes.

She still remembered times when there had been no ration meters, and her parents’ constant fear that they would run out of water in the middle of the day because it had been so hard to keep track of how much you had already used, especially since no distinction was being made between water for cooking, drinking and cleaning. All of these were still lumped together in daily consumption today, but the ration meters at least made it possible to keep track – and control – of consumption.

The same, of course, went for all limited resources – power and fuels were also rationed per apartment and were allotted per month instead of per day. Every family being assigned a new apartment ran out of one or the other before the end of the month at least once - but as this was a hard lesson, most of them took only one to learn how to even out their consumption and make their resources last until the end of the month.

Carol had been living alone with Sophia for three years now, and she certainly didn’t miss her former husband, Ed. He had been abusive almost since the beginning of their marriage, but his violence had really gotten out of control after he had lost his job at the food processing plant because of his disrespectful behavior toward his boss and his co-workers. Always one to believe he was better than everyone else, one day he had taken it that one step too far and been let go.

On that day, he had given her her first merciless beating, but it had taken her five more months to make up her mind to leave him. One night when he’d been out drinking with his buddies - it had been the beginning of the month and he had received the minimum unemployed cash allotment intended to support his family through the end of the month - she had woken little Sophia and made a run for it, leaving their apartment, leaving the city behind. To her knowledge, he had never attempted to find her.

Before Ed, she had shared an apartment with a friend, so she knew how to be self-sufficient right off the bat – and she never ran out of her allocations before the new ones were due to arrive, either. She would have felt horrible if Sophia had wanted for heat or water because of her.

Yet allocations were getting cut down every year, and not just for water, fuel, and air, but for food as well, with fewer stamps for smaller amounts and with less variation in the kinds of food itself handed out year after year.

By now, her allocated food rations only comprised soy cubes, monthly rations of meat analog – she regularly shuddered to think what that might be -, three types of flour – with availability determining which one she would receive every month anew -, and a small, tasteless type of potato that was resistant to the diseases rampant on the fields because of the inescapable pollution. 

All other foods, everything that could spice up a meal and bring some diversity to the table, could be bought on the free market. But availability was sketchy and consequently the prices were so high that practically nobody but the top one per cent of the population could afford them on a regular basis. She usually made an effort to save enough for one treat for Sophia's birthday, but she did need the entire year for it to work out, and the treat had been getting more meager with every year.

She hated the austerity forced upon them. The constant hunger gnawing at her – for she always gave more than half of their meals to her daughter, who was still growing, and whom she didn't want to grow up lacking anything. The monthly worry if their rations, downsized nearly every month, would hold out until their stocks got replenished. This, she thought bitterly, looking at the brochure, was hardly a life that was actually worth living anymore. With 13 billion people living on Earth as per the 2146 census and the planet all but groaning under the load of so many mouths to feed, austerity was the rule, not the exception.

And she knew that Sophia's life would be even harder than hers.

For the past three years, all remotely technical resources had been rerouted into a project designed to save mankind from itself. As restrictions on population growth hadn't had the desired effect, and with Earth itself growing more and more inhospitable to the point where breathing outside air or drinking untreated water was no longer possible anywhere, a new solution had been found.

A solution which would not accommodate everyone, and which would ultimately leave Earth with its resources utterly depleted and only those ineligible for the only way out staying behind to perish.

And Carol was determined that Sophia would not be among those left behind on a dying Earth.

Only those with certain skills were eligible.

And parents accompanying their children.

"Help Build Mankind's Future in Space!"

As Carol did not possess any of the various skills required to get accepted onto one of the three huge spaceships being built in orbit at a cost in labor, raw materials and other resources that would leave a barren planet behind, Sophia had become her own one-way ticket out – and her mother's.

While Carol did not believe the brochure's glowing promises of a life in the lap of luxury on some faraway second Earth, she did know that everything had to be better than being left behind to die of starvation and pollution. This was not a fate she would wish upon anyone, much less her own daughter.

The money she’d already saved for this year's birthday treat for Sophia was going into a train ticket to the nearest recruiting office.

Tomorrow, she was going to apply for two spaces on the second ship to leave Earth.


	2. Interlude 1

The ship, still without a name, was a silent shadow above Earth on its night side. The space dock had adjusted its position to the progress work on the ship was making, moving forward toward the bow by half a klick using only its attitude thrusters instead of the main drive. The adjustment had taken nearly two days but the work crews had not been affected by this - they had their material lined up at their work stations and were always stocked for two days in advance in case of a system failure.

One day of building this ship cost Earth the annual gross national product of the former United States of Europe, regardless of whether or not anyone was actually working on the ship.

Not one day was wasted up here. There were no weekends, no national holidays, no religious holidays. Workforce members were allowed to take days off for them, but they didn’t get paid for holidays, and if their temporary replacements were better suited for the job they ran the risk of getting sent back to Earth.

Nobody wanted to be sent back to Earth.

Working on the ship brought you plus an adult family member plus a child a place on it once it set out across space, without the need to actually set foot on the planet again before the ship left.

And nobody wanted to be left behind.

The unfinished ship continued its dance with gravity, hanging above Earth like a promise - or a threat.


	3. Chapter 3

Wiping his grease-smeared hands on the red rag he always carried in the back pocket of his work coveralls, Daryl Dixon took a step back from the filter he’d been working on for the past two hours and kept observing the gauges’ hands as they approached their target ranges and then trembled to a halt once they had reached them. Closing his eyes, he took off his earmuffs and listened to the deep hum of the filter, not trusting the readings nor his instruments while the housing had still been open. Only when the low, regular thrum of the working filter had convinced him that the problem was solved did he tighten the screws that held the access panel on the housing in place and then gather his tools into his box, packing up for the day.

„Hey, Jim!“ he called out to his colleague who was sweeping the floor. Their shift was about to end, Jim had finished work on a clogged pipe five minutes earlier, and they always made an effort to leave a clean shop for the next maintenance-only shift, unless the place was coming down around their ears. Jim looked up, pausing in his sweeping. „You up for a glass?“ Daryl asked, miming the act of raising a glass to his lips and tilting it as Jim was quite far away - five of the huge, loud filters were lined up between them. Jim nodded, also swiping down his earmuffs to hang around his neck so he’d hear Daryl better if he should call out again.

Daryl, however, right after picking up Jim’s nod, made sure that all his tools were in his box before closing it and purposefully walking off to his locker where he quickly got out of his steel-toed black work boots and his bluish-gray coveralls and into black jeans, a black jacket and scuffed light brown boots that he’d picked from the locker. Placing his coveralls and tool box into the locker, he closed it again, thumbing the lock.

Normally, he designed filter systems like these. His office was located in the adjacent building which housed administration, plant safety - and Design and Development. He had spent the past eight months developing an upgrade for their filters that he was now installing in each unit. Two of the regular technicians - Jim and his colleague Milton - were learning to do it from him so they would be able to upgrade the remaining units once Daryl had left.

He had resigned and would be joining the space exploration mission, for which three ships were being built in orbit, as an engineer. Only two days ago he had received a message informing him that he had been put on the team that was to work on the second ship - and he had been given his relocation date.

Daryl Dixon would leave Earth for the space ship that would take him away in two weeks, never to return.

The saddest thing about him leaving Earth, Daryl thought as he headed for the plant’s exit, still listening to the comforting sounds of the air filtering systems with half an ear, was that he hadn’t even been able to fill any names into the two blanks on his form for the adult and the child that he was allowed to take with him to wherever his ship would be going. While he had an older brother, Merle, who was his only surviving family member, he had no idea where Merle might be right now - and didn’t know him well enough to tell if Merle would even be willing to join such a mission.

And there had never been what people called a “significant other” in his life, either male or female, let alone a child from any such union. Daryl had been living alone for years, and he didn’t feel he was missing out on anything. In fact, living alone freed him from any obligation to watch out and care for anyone else - nobody depended on him to save food, water, heat so they’d have enough. He would have done it, of course, but it was … liberating … not to have to plan ahead for a child depending on him to do right by them. If he ran out of anything at the end of the month, it was his own fault and he was the only one affected - the only one to go without food or water for two days, or to have to suffer a cold room if he had indulged himself during a cold spell.

In addition to that, not having anyone in his life any longer made leaving that much easier. He had a few friends that he could hang out with after work, but he could exist without social interaction for weeks at a time and knew that he would not miss any of them enough to make him stay on a dying planet when there were ways to get off it and start anew on another world. Ever since he had signed on for the mission he had been waiting eagerly for any news not just on the public news feeds but also for him personally, and now that he had been given his departure date, his cycle times, and his cryopod number, he was itching to leave his dingy one room apartment behind where he kept his three outfits for work and the two for his free time on a shelf in his kitchen along with his five chipped plates and his three cups because there was not enough room for any cupboards or closets.

Living on board a spaceship couldn’t possibly be any worse than living in this decaying hellhole, and he would get a chance to explore an untarnished world at the end of the trip and put his skills as an engineer to use in ways that were closed off to him down here. In space, and on a world that they were beginning to explore and conquer, there would be challenges as unique as the situations he would find himself in.

On Earth, the time for challenges was over - except for the ultimate challenge of surviving as a species. Nobody had ever asked him to develop an upgrade for the air filters of his plant - he’d had a brilliant idea in the middle of the night as he’d found his way to his foldout toilet in the dark, stumbling over his chair, and had suggested it to his boss the next morning. It didn’t require any resources beyond those already allocated to the plant for maintenance, so he’d been given a green light for going through with it - knowing all too well that any requirements exceeding their allotment would have killed his upgrade on the spot because all available resources went into the Seeding mission, and into the three ships drifting in the cold silence of space as they were getting closer to completion each day.

Once he was on board his ship, only the sky would be his limit - literally. In space as well as on a new planet, creativity would be essential for their survival. Money would no longer be an issue, and if the idea was good enough, getting the resources to develop it would be a walk in the park. Anything that made surviving out there easier would be pushed and encouraged, and he would finally be able to free his mind from the shackles of resource restriction.

Mulling over the endless possibilities that would open up to him once he had left, Daryl had made his way out of the building, off the company grounds, and toward home, operating completely on autopilot. On leaving the building his hand had reached into his jacket pocket to dig out his mask and place it over his nose and mouth. The air wasn’t toxic yet, but it was rapidly going that way. Daryl had read about blue skies in old books but had never seen one. The clouds permanently shrouding the sun had a greenish yellow hue, and if he were to lift the mask and take one whiff of unfiltered air, he would have smelled smoke, soot, and ozone.

Reaching his apartment building, he ran his access card down the reading slot and pushed the door open with his shoulder when the lock hummed and the green LED on it flickered to life for an instant. With a sigh, he looked at the naked, stained concrete stairs leading up and down to the small apartments lined up around the stairwell and set out for the fourteenth floor down. He had half an hour to change and relax before he and Jim were going to meet in their regular waterhole, and he was looking forward to some time alone.

He couldn’t wait for the cryopod that he would have all to himself.


	4. Interlude 2

The ship hung in space, blindingly white and invisibly dark as it straddled the terminator between night and day.

If anyone had observed it from afar, it would have appeared to be swarmed by insects, parasites maybe, that were moving up and down its length, coming in closer, then retreating again, some of them anchoring themselves to its hull, touching it, inspecting details, doing things to it.

It looked like a carcass in the first stages of being devoured - when in reality the ship was just coming to life, computers, engines, life support systems coming online in every section, while the true carcass was the world hanging below it.

The world that the small specks going over the ship for one final time before it would leave its space dock were leaving behind.

Their dying home, that they had exploited relentlessly for centuries, millennia even, rendering it uninhabitable, inhospitable, more so than many worlds that they had seen out there and collected data on from afar, and much more so than the three that had been selected to become the fertile ground in which mankind would plant its descendants.

The Seeding mission was in its final stages of preparation. The engineers and technicians who had spent the past fourteen years designing and building this ship were giving it one final inspection, making sure that it would be a safe home for the people lining up on the ground, the tickets for themselves and their loved ones clutched in sweaty fingers as an unseen sun was setting or coming up behind a constant veil of toxic clouds permanently hiding it from sight.

Over the next few days, the passengers would board the ships, and once boarding was complete, they would leave - and the remnants of humanity would stay behind to die on a world where plants could no longer grow, where exposure to untreated water and air would slowly kill them, where any lingering hope would be gone with the departure of the last ship.

Those venturing out into the unknown, into dangers unimagined and the vacuum of space uncharted, would be the lucky ones.


	5. Chapter 5

“Will there be many other children on the ship? Will I be able to play with them during the wake cycles?” Sophia was skipping around Carol as she just couldn’t sit still any longer. She had been asking questions non-stop all day, and her excitement had her eyes shine and her cheeks glow. “Will all the children always be awake at the same time so they can be together and become friends? Will we eat together with the other children?”

Sophia’s enthusiasm was catching - Carol caught herself smiling as she packed their few possessions in the handbag they were allowed as luggage. “I really don’t know how many children there will be, sweetie,” she began when Sophia had to pause for breath. “And I don’t think they can coordinate their wake cycles, I believe that would be too much work. We might get woken up by aisles, or by sections - they need to pump air into the spaces where the people are awake, so they’d have to wake them in separate enclosed areas.”

Her adorable little girl hugged her rag doll to her chest, the words almost bursting out of her. “Maybe they’ll put all the children in one aisle, then, or one section, so they can wake us all up at the same time and we get to eat and play and get to know each other …” Sophia twirled on her toes as if dancing, and it took all of Carol’s self control not to join her. Over the past year, ever since they had been accepted as passengers, things had been getting increasingly dire on Earth, especially with more and more resources being redirected to the Seeding mission in its final stages, and she couldn’t wait to leave. She rather felt like dancing herself, now that the day had come.

Instead, she zipped their bag closed and looked about herself.

The furniture came with the apartment and would stay behind. Their meagre possessions were either in the bag she was holding, or had been handed out to friends and neighbors who were staying behind and could use them. Nothing at all in here indicated that anyone had ever lived here. There were no mementos, no personal touches at all. Naked, unpainted concrete walls and floors. Not even a window for which she could have selected a curtain.

The empty shell of the life they were leaving behind - and just like Sophia, she couldn’t wait to get out.

Taking Sophia by the hand, she stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind herself one last time.

They didn’t look back.

.-.

Daryl was already wearing the thin dark green overall that would designate him as a tech even in cryosleep. He had switched to i.v. nutrients two days before and was still getting used to the i.v. port in the back of his left hand, fiddling with the bandage protecting it when he was outside his pod as he watched the last batch of passengers coming into his “home” section of the ship. Several pods in his aisle were still unoccupied, so he guessed that some of these people would end up being his neighbors for the duration of the voyage.

He had been living on board the Endurance for a year, working on completing it, submitting suggestions for subtle improvements here and there that would save energy or improve their shields or coax slightly more power out of their drive. Every engineer coming on board either of Endurance or one of her sister ships, Persistence and Resilience, had been provided with a file containing the complete technical manual of the ship for this exact purpose - optimizing all functions of the ships. Hundreds of these small improvements had been made over the entire construction period and had been shared among the three ships, and Daryl was exhilarated that half a dozen or so were his.

As he looked on, a girl reaching up to his chest stepped up to the round hatch he was standing next to and lifted one foot to step over its rim, but her shoe got caught and she pitched forward and would have hit the metal grille making up the narrow walkway with her small, naked hands - if Daryl hadn’t stepped forward on reflex, reaching out to catch her with both hands. She had already dropped her doll, and once he had helped her regain her balance, he bent down to pick it up and hand it back to her.

“Takes some gettin’ used to, these round hatches,” he mumbled, blushing, as a slender, lithe woman with shortish, graying hair came up behind the girl, visibly upset and concerned. Probably her mother, he thought as he glanced up at her and then looked back down, first at the girl and then at the metal floor as they all continued down the walkway. 

“Thank you so much for catching her.“ The voice was soft and kind, and the woman, holding the girl by one hand now, stepped into his narrow field of vision. „These curved hatches are difficult, we have been stumbling a lot, coming in. How long does it take to get used to them?“

Daryl looked up in mild panic. Just why had he chosen that exact spot to stand? “‘bout a week, give or take. You’ll be asleep before yer used ta it, though. They’ll be puttin’ us in tomorrow, soon as you’re all fixed with a port.“ He lifted his bandaged hand and the girl’s eyes widened as if in fear.

“That’s nothin’ to be afraid of,“ Daryl added hastily, dreading screams and tears. He had no experience whatsoever with children so far, and the ones already on board had been making him wary and uncomfortable as he didn’t trust himself to behave properly around them. Despite his good start with this one, it seemed he had been justified in his misgivings.

“We can’t eat while we’re sleeping, and we’ll be asleep for years at a time, so they’ll have to feed us in our sleep,“ he explained. Loosening the bandage, he allowed her a look at his i.v. port before covering it again. “You get an access port to your blood vessels like this one, and when you go to sleep in your pod you get a tube attached to it, and they give you liquid food through the tube until you wake up again.“

“But -„ The girl’s eyes welled up and Daryl wondered what he’d said. “I wanted to eat and play with the other kids?“ She looked up at the pixie-faced woman leading her along next to him. “Mommy?“

The woman gave Daryl a helpless look. “I don’t know in detail how any of this works, sweetie, or how often they will wake us up. I know they will, they have to, but I don’t know exactly … The brochure says that a doctor would tell us when we’re up here.“

Remembering the informed consent process, Daryl nodded at her and the girl, silently wondering why he was so involved in this. Could he just go back to his cryopod and lie down in peace? But the girl’s fear tugged at his heart, and he just couldn’t help himself. Checking the numbers of the pod aisles they were passing, he saw that his own was coming up and gestured for the two of them to follow him. When he reached his own pod he pressed the eject control and the seal hissed open as the pod slid out soundlessly, much like a hydraulic drawer.

Even the woman was looking queasy now. “This is what they put us into?” she asked, sounding doubtful. “Without light, or a … window, just … a box in a wall?”

“Anything else would take up too much space, and you won’t be needin’ no window since you’ll be sleepin’,” Daryl explained, pointing at the ladder rungs set into the plasteel wall to the left and right of his pod which did indeed look like a low, narrow box with a rather uncomfortable bed in it. “This way, we were able to put four pods on top of each other. If you place them separately, with opening lids, we’d only have enough space for maybe one tenth of the people we’re actually carrying. And that goes for all three ships, so that’s a really big difference in number of people, skills, genetic variety.” He actually averted his eyes and blushed at that last one, she saw.

Now he leaned forward and carefully tugged out his port connectors and tubes from under his bedding, protected by a sealed sterile plastic wrap. “See, there’s one for water and one for food. They connect to the port in your hand, and then you get food and water through them while you’re asleep.” He pointed at the readout set into the wall above his pod, dark now because his pod was empty and offline. “Once you get in, the computer monitors your health, and what you’re getting. You get water constantly, and food twice a day, exactly the amount the computer calculates for you every month, based on your age and size,” he explained to the woman and her daughter. 

“And it doesn’t hurt at all, they’re very good at doin’ this - they’ve been puttin’ them into so many people, and they’re almost done by now, so they’ve had lots of practise. You’re the last batch to get yours.” He slapped the back of his hand and then wiggled his fingers to prove that it wouldn’t hurt, and some of the girl’s doubt left her eyes. “I’ve been sleepin’ in here for some time already, and I switched to the liquid stuff two days ago.” On impulse, he caught the girl’s eyes with a look he hoped was reassuring. “You’ll be okay, promise.”

Her mother gave him a grateful look. “Thank you so much for showing us,” she said shyly, “but I think we’ll have to find our own … pods? … now, and then find the doctor for our appointment. Say good-bye, sweeetie, and - have you thanked him yet for keeping you from falling?” she prompted her girl.

“Thank you, …?” Her eyes, much too large and much too old for her face, gave him a questioning look as she switched her doll from her right hand to her left, preparing for a handshake.

“Daryl,” he ground out, holding out his hand as if she might chop it off. “Name’s Daryl.” And, with a glance at her mother, debating whether or not to shake her hand as well, “Dixon.” Pointing at his pod number, he added, “This is where you can find me if you or your daddy have any questions before we go in. Only got five hours of work left until then, after that I’ll be off.”

The woman caught his eyes, a look of … relief? … on her face that confused him for a moment. “No daddy,” she corrected him. “We’re alone here. Carol Peletier.” She held out her hand for him to shake, ending his internal debate. “And Sophia, my sunshine.” With her free hand, she tugged her boarding information out of her jacket pocket. “Now, where do we need to go?”

She looked at the number of his pod again, then at those of the neighboring pods to orient herself. Raising an eyebrow, she held her paperwork out to Daryl. “Our pod IDs start with the same numbers as yours?” she asked.

He could feel heat flooding him as he looked at their numbers. “We’re neighbors,” he mumbled with a tentative smile as he took a few steps back to point at the pods next to his, separated only by the ladder leading up to the three pods lined up over the lowest one. “You’ll be right next to me.” Waiting until they had both stepped up to him, he held the small chip embedded in each of her boarding tickets up to the scanner for the pod stack and the two lowest pods hissed open.

“Welcome home!”


	6. Interlude 3

It was a momentous occasion. This solar system was not going to witness anything like it again.

The children of this sun were leaving their home forever, along with the multitude of unfortunate ones who were unable to contribute to their quest that was devouring their planet’s last resources, dooming them along with their exhausted world.

It was only those willing and able to contribute to the technical, scientific, and practical aspects of the Seeding mission, and those bringing valued skills or traits to the table, that were able to join it, giving themselves and their descendants a new lease on life.

Persistence was the first to drift free of its moorings. As soon as the magnetic clamps holding it in place in the space dock folded back from its anchoring prongs, the effects of gravity and rotation began to play out, and the captain activated the ship’s attitude thrusters to counter them and then gently lift the ship out of orbit and into space.

Blinding sunlight struck it as it rose out of the Earth’s shadow, and its environmental controls started pumping hot air from the sun-drenched side of the ship to the dark one. The people standing directly in the sunlight at the circular view ports would notice that it was warmer there, but that side of the ship was not going to get cooked.

Persistence’s sister ships, Endurance and Resilience, which had been built almost simultaneously and had been finished within the four weeks following the completion of Persistence, also started moving now, entering the formation in which they were going to travel. Each ship carried not only its precious cargo of human life but also plant seeds and fertilized eggs as well as embryos of thousands of animal species, safely cryostored, that the children of mankind were taking along to their new home.

With the world ending below them, they were on the brink of a new beginning.


	7. Chapter 7

Once the fool bragging about his ticket for Endurance was drunk beyond reason, it wasn’t difficult to relieve him of said ticket as well as his ID. What a lucky coincidence to have run into an ex army man with such a similar military training that impersonating him would pose little to no problem.

Until today, with fourteen years of preparation having gone into the Seeding project, Merle Dixon had had enough time to make his peace with being doomed to die along with his home planet. Now, however, with a valid ticket to survival and the untainted ID of a man of similar build and looks and a virtually identical background in his pocket, he almost burst with excitement and renewed hope. With zero effort on his part, he had made it. He would live, while the man who had applied for and been awarded his ticket, and whom he had kept feeding drinks until he’d been senseless probably way past his boarding time, would die in his stead. In his own inimitable way, Merle had proved himself to be a survivor, not by virtue, but vice.

And who knew, this stupid Seeding project was just the kind of bleeding heart benevolent activity that his pussy of a baby brother might have gotten involved in.

Maybe Daryl would not stay behind to die either.

Maybe he would see his brother again.

.-.

Carol and Sophia had received their I.V. ports as well as a small chip just under the skin right next to it which they could use for accessing their area of the ship and opening their pods. They all received their schedule detailing their sleep and wake cycles. The „old timers“, who had been living and working on Endurance for some time already instead of only moving in right before its departure, received one last physical check-up. Carol and Sophia were issued white coveralls, indicating that they had no specialized functions to fill on Endurance.

Sophia was still very nervous about going into the pod, and only calmed down once the cryotech for their area gave her permission to take her doll into the pod with her. She was undecided about which of their two pods to choose until the very last moment, when she went for the upper one, the second one up from the ground, explaining that „I will fall into mommy’s lap if anything goes wrong, and she will not allow anything bad to happen to me.“

The passengers in their section were going to be woken up again for a short period of time twenty years into the voyage, after staying in suspended animation for that time. Their aging process was going to slow down significantly during cryosleep, to the point of almost coming to a stop - at the end of the two hundred year voyage to their destinations, the passengers on all three ships would only have aged roughly two years. Most of the adults would still be in their prime, at the peak of their efficiency, once they would be called upon to rebuild a functioning human society on the three neighboring planets selected for their mission.

When the time came for them to go to sleep, Daryl went first so Carol and Sophia could watch. As he had been doing it every night for some time already, he hooked himself up to the nutrient and water lines, and the tech placed his catheter. “Good night, see you on the other side,” he offered the woman and the girl watching him, feeling very bold.

Daryl briefly thought of Jim, as he had quite often during this past year. He remembered saying good-bye to him on his last day at the plant, and Jim’s brave smile as he wished him a long, healthy, and happy life on his new home world, with tears brimming in his eyes as they shared a quick hug and slapped each others’ backs. Jim, Daryl knew, would have been just as qualified as he himself was to join this mission, yet he hadn’t had the courage to face centuries of unconsciousness and the unknown dangers of the voyage and its destination.

Jim had been his friend, and Jim was going to die within the next few years, long before his time.

Daryl had to take a deep breath to come back to the present and step back from his survivor’s guilt. The psychologists on board had had to deal with this in all the people working on the project as they had had more time to cope with being more or less guaranteed survival while others - their friends and loved ones - were definitely going to die. He couldn’t imagine having family down there that he actually gave a damn about - for his brother Merle surely didn’t fall into that category. Bracing himself, Daryl put on a brave face for the two watching him.

He grinned at teary-eyed Sophia, giving her an encouraging thumbs up, and smiled at her mother reassuringly as he lay down in his pod for the last time for twenty years once all the vital signs sensors for the monitoring system had been placed and his catheter was hooked up to his pod’s life support system. The pod silently slid into its wall compartment, the closing seal hissed - and Carol watched the temperature gauge of the pod drop rapidly from green through yellow to blue, the numbers getting first ever smaller and then, beyond the freezing point, higher again, as Daryl was being frozen alive in it.

Next, Carol soothed Sophia while she was being prepared for her pod, and watched with a heavy heart as her little girl was set up with monitoring equipment, her I.V. and water lines, and her catheter, before bravely hugging her and allowing herself to be lifted into her pod. Hugging her doll close to her chest, Sophia kept looking up at Carol until the very last moment as the pod closed.

Carol was the last of the three to climb into her pod even as the last few people on their aisle were also getting into theirs with the help of the dozen techs for their section. There were numerous techs and several equally qualified crews on board so the people filling these functions would also be able to profit from the delayed aging process of cryosleep by rotating into and out of active phases during the mission.

After watching her neighbor and her daughter being cared for by their tech, Carol felt well prepared and indeed well taken care of when it was her turn. The Asian woman gently placed her sensors and her catheter, constantly making sure she was still comfortable, hooked up her I.V. and water lines, and wished her a good rest.

Watching the light inside the pod getting dimmer and dimmer as it closed, watching the visible strip of ceiling getting ever narrower, was disconcerting, but like Daryl, like Sophia, she trusted the technology as well as the tech watching over her pod, and consciously tried to relax. Once the pod had closed, several dim LED spotlights flickered to life inside it, providing minimal illumination. For all she knew, these would stay on during her entire sleep cycle, but probably they would be switched off again to save energy as soon as her pod reached its operating temperature and it would no longer matter to her if it was light or dark inside it.

She took a deep breath, embracing this new part of her life wholeheartedly and without reservations. She was leaving behind some very ugly stretches, and she had no regrets over leaving Earth. She was giving Sophia the chance she deserved, and she would have felt remiss in her duties as a mother if she had not tried her utmost to bring her to this point. She had done well, and she was leaving with a clear conscience. Carol felt at peace.

There was a soft hissing noise as the gaseous sedative was released into the air, and she began to feel drowsy. As her eyes closed, she had a brief sensation of intense cold - and then nothing.

The temp gauge of her pod plummeted and reached blue, and the control lights for her pod stack - as well as those of Daryl’s stack next to it - signalled that all systems were operating according to specs. The tech nodded toward her supervisor and entered her “all clear” in the computer - all of the pods she was responsible for were occupied and working within parameters. All of her charges were asleep. The techs would be next to go under - all but the last two per cent, who would remain awake to watch over the sleepers, and take their turn at sleeping after one year of active duty.

.-.

Merle looked through the tiny viewport of the shuttle for one last glimpse of Earth. He had no idea if his brother was still down there or not as only hours had passed since he had “obtained” his ticket and there had been no time to check. If he was, Merle wished him well, but he was aware that the chances of survival for the people left behind approached zero rather than one, let alone anything higher. He had asked if Daryl was a member of the mission team on coming aboard, but had been told that such information could not be disclosed to him for privacy reasons. Even pointing out that Daryl was his brother didn’t get him anywhere - if they were close enough for Daryl to be okay with him getting this information, he was told, Daryl would have informed Merle himself.

So here he was, going through the various information sessions, getting a physical checkup - and thank goodness that his years of being a slouch hadn’t fucked up his body too much! - , going through an informed consent process for the whole freezing and cryosleep thing. And after just one day on board, and barely getting to know anyone who was going to share his section of the ship, it was time to get into his pod and be put to sleep.

Merle still felt that this sounded way too much like putting an animal down out of mercy for his liking, but the terminology surrounding the entire cryosleep thing, unfortunate though it might have been, had been established for years, over the entire duration of the planning and construction phases, and it was too late to change it now for the comfort of the passengers. He would just have to live with the idea that he was going to be “put under” and try to not associate it with getting killed.

During his last waking moments he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have tried to find Daryl while there had still been time, tried to make up with him - he had been the one, after all, to piss off his brother, royally so, so Daryl hadn’t really had any reason to go looking for him. Much had gone wrong between them, but this was a huge step, and he regretted not having at least attempted to get into contact with his baby brother one last time. He just hoped that a fresh start on a new world would help him to get over this particular regret and move past his bad conscience.

Merle got into his pod, glared at the young black cryotech hooking him up and operating his pod, and lay down. He watched the strip of ceiling that he could see from his pod - the top one in his stack - dwindling to nothing until some shitty, dim LEDs came on, as if he were some fuckin’ pussy who couldn’t go without a night light. As he felt that his eyes should be closed while he was technically sleeping, close them he did. He heard the soft hissing of the sedative being released into the pod’s interior, thought of Daryl one last time - and was out like a light as the temperature went down.

.-.

Endurance moved off into space as her main drive came online, shrouded in silence and flanked by her sister ships, with most of the people on board fast asleep under a layer of rime.


	8. Interlude 4

While their interstellar drive was still powering up, two years into the journey, they passed Jupiter and its moons. 

He had been brought out of cryosleep to fix a problem with Endurance’s air scrubbers. The buildup of carbon dioxide in the active areas exceeded the calculated limit, and while it wasn’t yet reaching toxic levels, the current commanding officer had decided that the problem was serious enough to warrant waking up their expert on air filtering and recycling technology.

Daryl had been working on the filters themselves and on the control routine for three days now, had identified the problem and was in the process of solving it. Working in the restricted access areas of the ship only, he hadn’t seen any of the people who were supposed to be up right now.

Wearing a ventilated environment suit with magnetized boots, he made his way back to the pressurized compartment set aside for staff roused from sleep for emergencies. It contained several individual living cubicles, each with a small store of freeze-dried meals and fluids, an entertainment center, a sanitary niche, and a bed. He was looking forward to all of these for ship’s night after being stuck in the confines of a narrow control compartment for the past thirteen hours.

With all the work he had done over the past few days, he was going to get to the final tests the next day and then go back to sleep. His pod had been switched to autonomous supply and removed from its stack to wake him up. He was going to get into it and go back into cryosleep in his cubicle, and be taken back to his regular location until his next scheduled wake cycle.

He looked out at Jupiter through the circular plasteel viewport he had been passing every day, marveling at the reddish and earthen hues of the gas giant and once more cursing his bad luck at the storm being out of sight from his vantage point. If everything was proceeding according to plan, only about two hundred people should be awake with him right now. These two hundred, plus himself, would be the only ones to carry an actual memory of seeing Jupiter with their own eyes to the stars with them.

Regret filled him.

Their own solar system was full of wonders, yet they had misbehaved and gambled away the time they would have had to explore them. Now it was too late. They were leaving Jupiter and its moons behind, just like the other planets of their own system - and the one they had inhabited.

His thoughts drifted back to Earth, to Merle, to Jim, and for a moment he wondered if they were still alive, if Earth was still alive, if it was still able to support any life, two years after the departure of the brightest and most gifted minds, those who had still been interested in - and capable of - making things work back there.

His hand came up to rest against the viewport in a final farewell.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our explorers take a severe hit.

_Painfully bright light lancing straight through her closed eyelids._

_Loud, rhythmic noises assaulting her defenseless ears._

_Hands tugging on her, sliding under her shoulders and back, insistent._

_Her heart racing in her chest, panic engulfing her._

_An arm around her, restraining her, while fingers tapped against her skin, doing things to her._

Her eyes flew open, and the ship stormed in.

.-.

The sedative kicked in maybe half a minute after the cryotech had helped her sit up in her pod on waking her up, but those thirty seconds had been a whirlwind of unfamiliar impressions - the lights in the compartment coming up slowly so the eyes of the passengers could adapt after sixteen years of darkness; the alarm blaring in time with the red emergency lights flashing; the tech holding her as she was disconnecting the IV lines from her port.

“Sophia?”

Her voice was rusty with disuse, her eyelids were caked with grit, her mouth felt dry. Moving was painful after years of lying motionless but for the massage function of the pod. Yet concern for her daughter would not let her take the time she would have needed to adapt to being awake again. The absolute need to make sure that her child was safe and well clawed at her, forcing her into action.

“Wait, wait!”

The tech desperately tried to keep her upright as she struggled to her feet, holding on to the tech’s shoulder with one hand and the rim of her pod with the other. Carol’s eyes flew to the red light strobing to her right, and the fact that “red” rarely equaled good news in high-tech environments slowly began to register with her sleep-addled consciousness.

“What happened?”

The tech made sure that she was sitting down properly and then let go of her arm to make room for someone approaching them down the narrow aisle - a man wearing a dark green coverall and heavy boots, with a bandage on his left hand. His unkempt hair was hanging in his face, all but hiding his red-rimmed, tired eyes, deep in their sockets and with dark circles under them. Clearly, he hadn’t slept in days. His face was so utterly lifeless with exhaustion that it took Carol long moments to recognize Daryl.

“‘scuse me,” he mumbled, barely looking up from his boots, his right hand reaching out for the pod stack to steady himself against it. He was swaying on his feet and looked ready to keel over.

“Daryl, what happened?” Carol asked him, aghast. “Is Sophia up yet?”

He glanced up, recognized her, and then checked the pod above hers.

“No, she’s still under, she’ll probably be in the last wave, with the other kids,” he mumbled, reaching for the controls of his pod to open it. “Sorry, I need to sleep, been up tryna repair those tanks ‘n’ filters for -” He glanced at the chrono on his pod. “- good lord, forty-two hours. I ain’t thinkin’ straight right now.”

The tech, realizing that Carol had found someone else to take care of her, turned toward the next pod stack to start reviving its occupants while Carol stared at Daryl in shock.

“Wait, you’re telling me you’ve been up for almost two days already, to repair something? Where are we? How long have we been traveling?” Incredulous, she watched him open his pod and start to climb the ladder to get into it. “Why are you repairing something? What do you mean, ‘last wave with the other kids’ - are they getting everyone out of cryosleep? But … we haven’t arrived yet? There are emergency lights?”

He stopped halfway up to his pod, hooked his right arm around a rung of the ladder, and turned his head to face her. Blood was beginning to seep through the bandage on his hand, but he didn’t seem to notice, nor did he seem to be feeling any pain. He looked so tired that she physically hurt just seeing the circles under his eyes that looked uncannily like bruises.

“We were hit by a passing meteor shower two days back,” he managed. “They were just … tiny bits of rock, nothing bigger than a pea, but …” He hesitated, everything about him radiating helplessness, and she felt she was standing on the precipice of something so momentous  that it would change her whole life, and those of the people around her.

_Sophia._

Daryl closed his eyes for a moment, and now he looked as if he should be unconscious. She didn’t think she had ever seen anyone this exhausted. What was going on here? Drawing a shaky breath, Daryl went on, the fingers of his right hand absent-mindedly worrying the bandage on his left.

“This ship has one huge flaw - its vital systems are all in one place, and there are no backups, either in the same place or anywhere else.” He opened his bruised-looking eyes and she wasn’t sure if what she was seeing in them were tears of frustration or exhaustion. “There was a whole stream of these tiny meteorites, and they hit our air and water supply tanks, the filters next to them, and our drive. Been patchin’ up the air and water tanks, and another team is on the drive, but …”

He shrugged and trailed off, his eyes unfocusing. Gripping one rung of the ladder with his right hand, he raised his left to stare at it, opening and closing it and watching the blood stains spreading all over the dirty bandage. He made a fist again, the look on his face annoyed.

“This fuckin’ hurts,” he muttered, sounding surprised.

A dark-skinned woman in doctor’s scrubs and with waist-long dreadlocks passed him with a critical look at his hand and his face.

“Didn’t I just send you to have your hand taken care of at the med center before getting some rest?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Ain’t got time for that,” he answered, with no fight left in his voice. “Too tired.”

“That’s the cut from the air tank, right?” The doctor had stopped and was motioning for him to come back down the ladder. She looked around for the nearest emergency medical kit and had him sit on the floor. “I’ll patch this up for now so you can sleep first,” she began, opening the kit and getting out scissors, two rolls of bandages, antiseptic wipes, and cotton dressings. “But this needs stitches or your hand will be an infected mess by this time tomorrow.”

She hunkered down next to him and gently grasped his injured hand. Daryl’s head sank down. He was clearly falling asleep sitting up. The doctor looked up at Carol.

“Is your pod near his?” At Carol’s nod, she looked back down at Daryl’s hand, searching for the end of the bandage and then making short work of it by simply cutting through it along the back of his hand, careful to avoid his IV port that he was still wearing. “Would you wake him up five hours from now and force him to get stitches for this?”

As she carefully removed the bandage, Carol gasped. A ragged, gaping cut slashed across Daryl’s palm, starting on the edge of his hand and reaching nearly all the way across to his thumb. The bandage he’d been wearing was soaked with blood already. The doctor made a hissing noise and started to clean and disinfect the wound. Once this was done, she curled up Daryl’s fingers, which made the gaping edges of the cut close slightly, and then placed a sterile dressing and one of the bandage rolls on it before tightly fixing them in place by winding the other bandage around Daryl’s hand and wrist, putting pressure on the cut to keep it closed and staunch the bleeding. Once it was tight enough, she tied the ends together on the inside of his wrist.

“Five hours,” she repeated with an intense look at Carol while rousing Daryl from sleep to get him into his pod. “Or he won’t have the use of it for at least two weeks - and we need every pair of hands that we’ve got on board for this.”

Not waiting for an answer, she took off for her next patient, leaving Carol to stare from her retreating back to Daryl’s closed pod, a nameless fear gripping her.

 


End file.
